From 2002 through 2005, Bertien van Manen
traveled all over Europe visiting families and
documenting their personal photographs, some
selected from albums or hanging on walls, and
others stashed in less obvious places around their
lives. She collected traces of war and suppression
and of happiness and sadness, encompassing a
century of history in these recorded—and here
re-recorded—meetings of human eyes, minds and
hearts. Beyond its very basic appeal, the project
seems to reassess van Manen’s earlier work—a
career of more direct photojournalism including
A Hundred Summers, a Hundred Winters, on the
people of the former Soviet Union, and East
Wind WestWind on the people China—and to
memorialize the paper print itself, in light of
pervasive new digital cameras and photo-enabled
cell phones that make her work all the more rare.